<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>You, Me, And The Gremlin Child That Follows You Around Makes Three by Ace of Jokers (AceOfJokers)</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27906601">You, Me, And The Gremlin Child That Follows You Around Makes Three</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceOfJokers/pseuds/Ace%20of%20Jokers'>Ace of Jokers (AceOfJokers)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Kamen Rider Saber</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Implied one-sided Akamichi Ren/Fukamiya Kento, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Sorry Not Sorry, and there was only one bed, nobody actually gets together, ren is a goddamn gremlin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:22:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,648</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27906601</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceOfJokers/pseuds/Ace%20of%20Jokers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In which books get mildly burned, heroes get a bit stranded, problems of mixing genres arise, and there's only one bed.</p><p>Oh, and Ren's there.</p><p>[ mutual unresolved pining with an intentionally ridiculous ending. short character study written many episodes ago that missed its chance to fit in anywhere. maybe someday... ]</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Fukamiya Kento/Kamiyama Touma</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>You, Me, And The Gremlin Child That Follows You Around Makes Three</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Touma sighed, flipping open the Diago Speedy Wonderride Book for about the hundredth time, not that Kento was counting. Half a chipper jingle almost began – </span>
  <em>
    <span>“Diago Speedy! Rev up the t-tires and awa- ke- n-”</span>
  </em>
  <span> – and then promptly died, as a puff of smoke drifted out from between the ‘pages’.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Mr. Daishinji’s going to be real mad at us about this, huh,” Touma clearly tried his best to be cheerful about it, regardless, scratching at his head beneath his (ridiculous, yet somehow well-suited) hat and smiling his best (most charming) half-sheepish grin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“To be fair, how were we supposed to know a Megid that looks like a firefighter was going to be capable of burning Wonderride Books?” Kento hurried to reassure him, with the best smile he could muster of his own. “I’m more worried about the fact that our phones aren’t working either…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It had seemed like another routine mission. Mei had spotted Megid activity, Sophia had picked the two of them to go investigate, and away they had went… only to find that the chunk of the city trapped inside the Alter Book was almost entirely on fire. (Why Sophia hadn’t sent Rintaro… well, Kento was sure that she had made that decision for a reason.) (Probably.)</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Even still, they probably would have been fine, if not for the fact that the Megid had disguised itself as a firefighter, or more accurately just plain looked like one, and that had tricked them long enough for it to pull off a sneak attack. Half their books had gone up in smoke – and they’d had to make a hasty retreat.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So now here they were, hundreds of kilometers away from even Touma’s bookstore, much less their base, with no working vehicles, no working phones, and, most of all –</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re sure the Book Gate, uh, book – you’re sure it got burned, too?” Touma asked, equal parts awkward and hopeful, but Kento had to shake his head.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Completely scorched,” he confirmed, opening it only to get a few halfhearted syllables before it too went silent.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>– Most of all, they had no easy teleport back to anywhere approaching ‘home.’</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And it was getting late.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were at least still in a city, so it wasn’t time to test whether they’dve really survived in all the wilderness-adventure books they’d acted out together as kids. Instead, it was just a matter of finding a hotel, and resolving to figure out a train or taxi route that would get them back to Touma’s bookshop in the morning. Easy enough. Easy enough, in theory, but…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why is everywhere packed?!” Touma whined, kicking at the ground in an adorable pout.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kento shrugged, patting his friend on the shoulder soothingly. “Because there’s about to be some kind of festival nearby, apparently.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, but shouldn’t it be, you know, cancelled now?” the annoyed novelist argued, waving a hand at the Alter Book’s visible effect on the horizon before giving up with a sigh. “Well, hopefully we can fix this before it comes to that, actually… Assuming we can sleep first. There’s gotta be </span>
  <em>
    <span>someplace</span>
  </em>
  <span> here with a room – c’mon, let’s try that hotel up the street.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kento realized he’d accidentally left his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and removed it. “Yeah, sounds like a plan. If we keep at it without giving up, we’ll get there in the end – like the tortoise and the hare, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Right!” Touma’s face immediately changed into a bright and sunny grin at the reminder of a story, just as Kento had hoped; he then turned to head up the street, with a spring in his step, but Kento…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kento watched him go, for a moment, the sight of that blindingly adorable grin etched into his mind and warmth lingering in his hand. His friend was so strong, so cheerful, so kind, so… So… </span>
  <em>
    <span>Damn it all.</span>
  </em>
  <span> He scrubbed his hands over his face, exhaling sharply while his friend wasn’t looking. This was, this was – </span>
  <em>
    <span>impossible.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Ignoring how cute he found his friend to be was impossible. Ignoring the way every single thing he did made his heart do a flip was impossible. Ignoring how much he wanted to take him into his arms and hold him close and maybe even kiss him was impossible. And telling Touma about </span>
  <em>
    <span>any</span>
  </em>
  <span> of this… that was the most impossible thing of all. Because Touma had nearly as many issues as Kento himself did, because half those issues were Kento’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>fault,</span>
  </em>
  <span> because they had more important things to be focusing on, and – most importantly – because he had no clue, none whatsoever, whether Touma would even accept such feelings from him, much less return them in kind. And he couldn’t lose one of his childhood friends again. Couldn’t lose his </span>
  <em>
    <span>remaining</span>
  </em>
  <span> childhood friend.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He just couldn’t.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So he shoved the feelings down, and hurried to catch up with that friend before he could notice that he’d paused.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>Kento sighed, looking down at the bed for a second before flipping open the Book Gate book for what Touma swore had to be the hundredth time, not that he was counting. As with every other time, a few syllables warbled out like a half-throttled nightingale, and then died in a puff of smoke.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, it’s not like we have much choice, is it?” Kento clearly tried his best to be cheerful about it, regardless, giving him his bravest smile. “Not like there’s another room to be had… One of us will just have to take the floor.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They’d finally found a hotel with an empty room, after a long period of wandering the endless streets of an unknown city, and as much as it had all been good research material for Touma – it was good to know firsthand what being lost and exhausted and foiled at every turn </span>
  <em>
    <span>felt</span>
  </em>
  <span> like – even he had grown tired of it as the hour had gotten truly late.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So finding a room available had been a miraculous stroke of luck. Or at least, nearly so. Only ‘nearly,’ because, well…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was the </span>
  <em>
    <span>slight</span>
  </em>
  <span> issue of it being a single-bed hotel room.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Only a slight issue, really, because Touma could see an obvious solution. “Wait, who says either of us needs to sleep on the floor? We can just share! Remember when we used to have sleepovers?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kento blinked at him. “T-Touma… Er. You </span>
  <em>
    <span>do</span>
  </em>
  <span> recall we were a lot, well… smaller, then?” His voice quavered, uncertainly, those pretty dark eyes flickering between him and the offending item of furniture.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Well. Okay. That was a point, as much as Touma was loathe to admit it. The bed could certainly </span>
  <em>
    <span>fit</span>
  </em>
  <span> the two of them, no question, but thinking over the physics of how it would work…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was still better than the alternative thought, though: sleeping on this wood floor sounded unpleasant at best. Not something he had personal experience with, but not something he was eager to add to his repertoire of lived experiences at this moment. The thought of Kento having to suffer it was likewise no good. So, therefore:</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’ll be fine! We can fit!” Touma said, putting on the best brave face of his own that he could muster. “It’s better than the floor, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kento… paused. It wasn’t unusual for his best friend to hesitate or space out these days, though usually Touma didn’t have so clear an idea of what was going through his head. His friend had grown a little mysterious, it seemed, in the years they’d spent apart – which was fine, of course. A good adventure ought to have a dash of mystery as well, in Touma’s opinion.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Regardless, in this case, it was no mystery at all that the source of Kento’s silent concern was the single bed right before their very eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I won’t shove you off or steal the covers, I promise,” Touma reassured him with a grin to fill that silence, the words falling from his lips before he could even think about them, as usual. (Promises, promises… As usual again, they felt heavy and important and oddly right and painfully wrong all at once, a strange ache in his fingers, a concept slotting neatly into a void in his head without filling or illuminating it in the least. He had to make them. He had to keep them. He did not know why.)</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s not…” Kento mumbled, almost too quiet for Touma to hear, before his face finally hardened itself with stubborn resignation to their fate. “Alright, well, I suppose we ought to at least try.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s the spirit!” Touma cheered, giving his friend an encouraging smile when he sat heavily on the edge of the bed. “Do you mind if I take first turn with the bathroom, then?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Go right ahead,” Kento nodded, polite as ever even with exhaustion written in every line of his soft smile, and Touma nodded back before hastily ducking into the small bathroom. Not much to do in here without any toiletries or a change of clothes, but…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He splashed water on his face, at least, with a heavy sigh, as he considered the way Kento’s soft smile got stuck in his head, the way his thoughts had scattered and his legs trembled a little at the sight of it. Kento was strong, Kento was brave, Kento was amazing and warm and so very cute – and Touma, Touma was in trouble. So that was another problem with sharing a bed, though not, in fact, the main one.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The main problem, he decided, was the genre. They were pretty clearly in your standard ‘high adventure’ tale, here. Swords, sorcery, mythical creatures, clashing factions and betrayal… All very on-brand. A dash of mystery, too, to keep things fresh, like he’d mused earlier. You couldn’t mix too many genres in, though. You had to pick a focus, or else your ideas would get muddied and your message lost, and this tale’s focus was clearly on the action (with that dash of mystery).</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Not</span>
  </em>
  <span> romance.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>God,</span>
  </em>
  <span> he wanted it to be, though. From the moment Kento had literally flown back into his life, a warm smile on that handsome face, Touma’s heart had started to race. He’d tried to ignore it, at first because he’d been trying to simply reconnect with a friend, taking things step by slow step – and then, all too quickly, he’d realized there was no time for this, and the genre was all wrong, and anyway Kento probably wasn’t interested, and besides Touma’s brain was a bit of a shattered mess at best, and a million other reasons to ignore his own feelings. So he’d shoved them down, over and over, carefully crafting the tale of a perfectly normal comrade in adventure.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Of course… Sharing a bed with him might make that more difficult even than usual. What else was he supposed to do, though? Sleeping on the floor – already established to be bad. Making too big a fuss about sharing the bed – potentially would reveal his hidden feelings, also bad. Pretending nothing was wrong and cheerfully getting through the night somehow – well, it wasn’t great, but… it was the only option left.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So here he was, patting his face dry with a towel, taking one last deep breath, and exiting the bathroom –</span>
</p><p>
  <span>– only to very nearly crash into Kento right outside it, pulling himself up short just shy of disaster. Which still left him too close to his friend, their bodies inches apart, and he… didn’t seem to be capable of moving. Oh dear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“My bad,” he said, automatically. He hoped Kento couldn’t hear how choked his voice sounded. Or at least wouldn’t realize why.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, I’m sorry. I just… got a little worried,” Kento said, his voice more than a little distracted himself. (Touma was the one with no clue why, now.) “You took a while.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ah, yeah.” Crap. Too awkward. Come up with something, come up with something…! “I’m fine.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh. Good.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Great.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nailed it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This was terrible. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know why Kento wasn’t moving. He didn’t know what to do with this impulse to just take Kento in his arms and kiss him and see what would happen from there. He could feel a heat rising in his face (and maybe some other places too), and he found himself wondering whether maybe this wasn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>actually</span>
  </em>
  <span> the right time, whether the story mightn’t progress this way, whether the genre couldn’t change, just a bit –</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, guys! Are we having a staring contest?! Can I join?!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>– and then a voice interrupted, familiar in its eternal chipper cheerfulness but rendered unfamiliar by its unexpected existence here, and finally both of them seemed to remember how to move, leaping apart and looking around for its source. It didn’t take long to spot.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>Ren?!”</span>
  </em>
  <span> Touma yelped, gawping at the grinning young swordsman who was standing there as if there were no issues whatsoever with him even </span>
  <em>
    <span>being</span>
  </em>
  <span> here. “How did you –”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Book Gate, duh,” Ren shrugged, jerking his thumb over his shoulder, where a Gate was indeed visible in the door that had once led to a closet. Then he turned his attention towards Kento and, as usual, his already-bright grin somehow redoubled. “Sophie sent me to find you and, tah-dah, here you are and here I am! I found you before anybody! I win!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good job, Ren,” Kento replied, with the usual hint of forced politeness (or perhaps Touma was only projecting). “Well… I suppose we can go home now, right, Touma? Sorry you paid for a hotel room for nothing – maybe we can go back to the front desk first and…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Touma sighed. Honestly, at this point, he was more annoyed at their moment just now having been derailed than about losing money, and, anyway… “I’d rather just go home already and get some sleep. Plus, the sooner we get these books back to Mr. Daishinji, the sooner he can get them fixed… I hope…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ooh, yeah, he’s gonna be totally mad at you,” Ren laughed as he looked at the burned books, and Touma shot him a glare, even though he himself had said so earlier. Ren was… one of his friends, yeah, definitely an important comrade-in-arms, but sometimes it was really easy to remember why they hadn’t gotten along when they first met. Right now was… sort of one of those times.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Now, now. If we’re lucky, he might even talk to us again someday,” Kento chuckled, patting Touma’s shoulder and defusing his annoyance somewhat. (… More than such a simple gesture should have, if he was being honest.) “Alright, come on, it’s late. If there’s nothing else here, let’s go home.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Touma nodded, although – his gaze slid over to Ren again, and a little of the annoyed-feeling returned. He really had wanted to see where that moment just now had been going, before the young swordsman had shown up and ruined it. Even if that ‘where’ had probably actually been ‘nowhere,’ even still… In a romance novel, this kind of plot interruption would totally have been an intentional ploy by a third party to break up the main couple.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Except it wasn’t, they weren’t any such thing, and anyway, Ren was… Well, Ren was Ren. Always wearing a smile, even when saying something cutting, and yet there was never a drop of malice to be found there. The very model of an innocent yet cruel child; sometimes Touma really wondered at Peter Fantasista being a </span>
  <em>
    <span>blue</span>
  </em>
  <span> book and not a green one… Anyway, all in all, it just wasn’t possible that Ren had planned any of this. That grin of his never hid anything.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Though – he thought he saw just a little bit of knowing smugness in that grin, this time, as he turned to follow Kento through the Gate.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was probably just his imagination, of course. After all…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This wasn’t that genre of story.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I know what you're thinking.</p><p>"Ace, what kind of hotel doesn't have carpeted floors? Or sample-size soaps and shampoos?"</p><p>To which the answer is, "a very bad one", of course.</p><p>You're welcome.</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>